Missing flight is third Malaysia-linked incident

Jakarta: The disappearance of AirAsia Flight 8501 on Sunday was the third air incident this year involving Malaysia, where budget carrier AirAsia in based.

Here's a look at the two other disasters, as well as the latest missing flight, which went missing with 162 people aboard less than an hour after taking off from Surabaya, Indonesia, for Singapore.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on March 8 triggered one of modern aviation's most perplexing mysteries. Flight 370, carrying 239 people, including five Indians and one Indo-Canadian, from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, vanished without a trace, sending searchers across vast areas of the Indian Ocean.

An initial multinational operation to locate the wreckage far off Australia's west coast turned up empty, without a single piece of debris found.

After a four-month hiatus, the hunt resumed on October 4 with new, more sophisticated equipment, including sonar, video cameras and jet fuel sensors aboard three ships that will spend up to a year in a desolate stretch of the sea, about 1,800 kilometers west of Australia.

The 60,000-square-kilometer search area lies along what is known as the "seventh arc" - a stretch of ocean where investigators believe the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed, based largely on an analysis of transmissions between the plane and a satellite.

Officials initially ruled out terrorism, but conspiracy theories have endured. Until the wreckage is found and examined, it will be impossible to say for sure what happened to the plane.